Spidering Hacks, by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain, offers "100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools" for creating and running your own spiders. Among these tips and tools, of course, are instructions for creating your own personal web crawler that works much like those used by the major search engines.

Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data is one of the first books that actually describes, in detail, the parts of contemporary search engines and how they function. The author, Soumen Chakrabarti, is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and the book reveals a rare glimpse at the inner workings of our favorite search tools.

Got the itch to go head-to-head with Google, Yahoo and all of the other big search players on the web? A new book provides a detailed blueprint for using and customizing Lucene, open-source search engine software that's freely available online.

Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher is a thorough introduction to the inner workings of what's arguably the most popular open source search engine.

"Just as the early 20th-century advocates of psychoanalysis saw sex everywhere, industry analysts and marketing managers are starting to call everything they like in computers and telecommunications 'peer-to-peer,' writes Andy Oram in the preface to Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies published by O'Reilly & Associates.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies may not have the same appeal as sex, but they have seemingly become all the rage in the early years of the 21st century. Though now crippled, Napster is the poster child for P2P, and its "dark twin" Gnutella has also received a lot of press. The Seti@Home project is another highly visible P2P effort. In this book, editor Oram has assembled a collection of articles penned by P2P experts.

The Firefox browser comes pre-configured with lots of great search tools, but it's also highly customizable, allowing you to push your online experience to new and fun extremes. I've written that Mozilla Firefox is the searcher's browser. Not only does it come preconfigured to easily search Google, Amazon and other important sites, it's easily extensible. You can snap-in plugins for literally hundreds of specialized search engines with just a few clicks, and just as easily remove them if you don't like what they do.

Adding new search tools to Firefox is just the tip of the iceberg of things you can do to extend and enhance the browser. A new book from O'Reilly, Firefox Hacks, shows you how to supercharge your browsing experience.

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NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.

About the author

Chris Sherman is a frequent contributor to several information industry journals. He's written several books, including The McGraw-Hill CD ROM Handbook and The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See, co-authored with Gary Price. Chris has written about search and search engines since 1994, when he developed online searching tutorials for several clients. From 1998 to 2001, he was About.com's Web Search Guide.

The U.K. Supreme Court has granted permission in part for Google to appeal against a ruling relating to a dispute over the user information through cookies via use of the Apple Safari browser.
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